Kelly facing school fury

PLANS to bus pupils from poorer areas to better schools and allow head teachers to restrain unruly pupils have been slammed. The controversial scheme by Education Secretary Ruth Kelly includes helping pupils from poor council estates to move to schools in better areas. A White Paper would also allow teachers to discipline and restrain unruly pupils.

PLANS to bus pupils from poorer areas to better schools and allow head teachers to restrain unruly pupils have been slammed.

The controversial scheme by Education Secretary Ruth Kelly includes helping pupils from poor council estates to move to schools in better areas.

A White Paper would also allow teachers to discipline and restrain unruly pupils. And parents would have to take responsibility for their disruptive children.

This could include wider use of parenting contracts and fines for parents if excluded children are found in the streets during school hours.

Inspiration for the measures came from a head teacher's success in a Trafford school where he has cracked down on poorly behaved pupils.

However, the White Paper, to be published tomorrow by the Education Secretary, has already been criticised by the Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott.

He fears that allowing schools to opt out of local education authority control would discriminate against the poor and favour the middle classes, introducing a "public school ethos" and reversing Labour's ideal of comprehensive schools.

Standards

Mr Prescott also questioned whether the 17 new city academies championed by Mr Blair have raised standards.

The plan is to allow secondary schools to set up as trusts, giving them power to hire their own staff and set their own curriculum. It has been portrayed by critics as an attempt to get rid of "bog standard" comprehensives.

The education secretary rejects this: "If you are talking about privilege, selection, unfair funding, then that is something I would never want to see."

The Liberal Democrat education spokesman Ed Davey said that the government was heading in the wrong direction.

"Choice and freedom for schools all sounds terribly good, but the analysis behind these proposals seems to be wrong.

"In the next 10 years there will be half a million fewer pupils in our secondary schools and that surplus is a huge opportunity to give choice to parents without major structural upheaval."

And the former education secretary Estelle Morris said she did not think that schools needed a radical structural reform.

She added: "We need a structure for the whole of the school system so that the activities of one school doesn't mean that a neighbouring school is destined to fail even further and children in it get a bad deal.

The Conservative education spokesman, and leadership contender, David Cameron claimed the White Paper will bring back grant maintained schools which were created by the Tories and abolished by Labour.

Ms Kelly, the MP for Bolton West, has acknowledged that there were tensions when the Cabinet discussed the issue, with Mr Prescott leading for the critics.